Some thought Sun's 16-core server chip would never see the light of day, but systems based on Sparc T3 will start shipping in 30 days

Oracle has announced new servers based on the Sparc T3 processor, a chip that began life at Sun Microsystems and which some said might never see the light of day.

Known previously by its code name, Rainbow Falls, the Sparc T3 has 16 processor cores, twice as many as Sun's current high-end chip, the UltraSparc T2 Plus, which was released about two years ago. Oracle appears to have made a slight branding change, shortening UltraSparc to simply Sparc.

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The processors are used in Oracle's T series servers, which run Sun's Solaris operating system and are designed for databases and back-end business applications, as well as other tasks like serving busy websites. They compete with Unix systems from IBM and Hewlett-Packard.

The new Oracle servers range from a single-socket blade up to a four-socket server housed in a five-rack unit. The systems will start shipping in 30 days, Oracle announced Monday. The company also confirmed that Solaris 11, the next big update to Sun's Unix OS, will appear sometime next year.

At one time it was unclear if the Sparc T3 would be released at all. When Oracle said it was buying Sun last year, some predicted that CEO Larry Ellison would kill off Sun's money-losing hardware business and focus instead on software assets like Java and Solaris.

It seems now that Oracle just wanted to make a splash with the announcement at its OpenWorld conference in San Francisco this week.

Each Sparc T3 core can process up to eight computing threads simultaneously, the same as the T2 Plus. The T3 cores run at up to 1.65GHz and have 6MB of level 2 cache memory, according to Oracle's website. Each processor has an on-chip cryptographic accelerator to speed up security functions and an integrated 10 Gigabit Ethernet chip for faster networking.